What to do when the same project needs to generate two specific products - and product build is not aligned?

Question

We work in a project where we have to build the same game for both Android and iOS platforms. The requirements are the same, but each result in specific products.

We use SCRUM in order to keep our team organized, and it works quite well. With this framework, we can focus on day-by-day jobs without big problems and it is easy to communicate with each person about "what we have done yesterday and what we will do today".

But several problems seems to come because we are working on the same thing, for different systems. There are times in which we feel like "not synchronized" between each one of us.

For example, Android platform is a bit more complicated when building a complex GUI, compared to iOS's toolbox. This could lead to episodes where Android devs are "one day late" in respect to the iOS team, just because they are a bit slower in creating the user interface.

SCRUM doesn't seem to give direct solution to these episodes. Is there any suggestion to make the project coordination and progress flowing, and still keeping both at the same pace?

Answer 1

Assuming that the Android & iOS deliveries structured as two different teams.

Scrum of Scrum has helped our organisation where inter-scrum teams issues need to triaged,coordinated and solved.

More here.... http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/scrum/team/

It doesnt need to be as formal as described above, in my company's case i solved such issues through a white board backlog of inter team dependencies and issues and held a daily 5 minute stand up to tackle issues as they came in.

Answer 2

Though I'm not sure that this question is entirely on topic (the answer can end up being very subjective, and it's not exactly related to the real purpose of Project Management), I will give you my two cents.

I would take a good, hard look at the Unity engine. http://unity3d.com/

Unity offers a wide array of options for developing games on Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8, Blackberry 10, and many more. It has built-in functionality to develop for each individual OS if you want specific features (you can add-on Pro toolkits for truly robust features in each of these categories), and it offers publishing options for these platforms as well. Code can also be written generically in Unity and published to multiple platforms without "reinventing the wheel".

I have found Unity to be very user friendly. They offer a plethora of tutorials, examples, documentation, and tools to make it much easier to develop (whether you're just getting into game development, or you're already a pro). Many people are using it so there's a robust community, and if you're truly stuck, Unity offers personalized support solutions. In addition to all this, you can use the free version of Unity to do the bulk of your development. Of course, there are some caveats and features differences between Unity and Unity Pro (caveats of free license(see bottom section): http://unity3d.com/unity/faq; features differences: http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses)

Hope this helped. Let me know if you have any questions.